Publications & Testimony

The Kansas Supreme Court has upheld the state’s death penal­ty against two death-row pris­on­ers’ chal­lenges that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment vio­lates the ​“inalien­able” right to life enshrined in the Kansas state…

Former Texas death-row pris­on­er Clinton Young has been released from cus­tody near­ly twen­ty years after being sen­tenced to death for a dou­ble mur­der he has con­sis­tent­ly said he did not…

Citing its ​“Christian val­ues” and the unavail­abil­i­ty of any humane means to car­ry out exe­cu­tions, Papua New Guinea has abolished capital…

Idaho prison offi­cials engaged in cloak and dag­ger prac­tices, includ­ing twice send­ing state employ­ees across state lines to make cash pur­chas­es of con­trolled sub­stances intend­ed for exe­cu­tions, active­ly con­ceal­ing the intend­ed use of the drugs, manip­u­lat­ing state records to cov­er up their activ­i­ties, and act­ing in bad faith to stonewall pub­lic records requests for exe­cu­tion-relat­ed infor­ma­tion, a joint inves­tiga­tive report by the Idaho Statesman and the Idaho…

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review two cas­es con­cern­ing the scope of death-row pris­on­ers’ access to the fed­er­al courts in lit­i­gat­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of their con­vic­tions and sen­tences or the method by which states seek to execute…

Two con­ser­v­a­tive Republican leg­is­la­tors, both for­mer sup­port­ers of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, have intro­duced leg­is­la­tion that would end death-penal­ty prosecutions in…

Adam Luck (pic­tured), the Chairman of Oklahoma’s Board of Pardons and Parole, has resigned from the board under pres­sure from Governor Kevin Stitt because of Luck’s votes in favor of clemen­cy for death-row…

On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on capital…

The same brand of Southern pride that inspired lynch­ings after the U.S. Civil War fuels sup­port for the death penal­ty today, writes legal ana­lyst Joia Erin Thornton (pic­tured) in a com­men­tary on the web pub­li­ca­tion, Blavity. In The Dark Southern Pride Upholding The Barbaric Death Penalty, pub­lished December 23, 2021, Thornton argues that, just as Southern states in Reconstruction turned to extreme carcer­al pun­ish­ments to reim­pose vio­lent con­trol over Black…

Kentucky​’s death penal­ty is racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry, geo­graph­i­cal­ly arbi­trary, and rid­dled with sys­temic flaws, a new study of the commonwealth’s use of cap­i­tal punishment has…